En Route

Abstract

This chapter explores how Russian immigrant mothers in Israel rear and cultivate their children, and how they foster their education en route to the middle class. We turn our attention to the women’s practice of razvitie, or ‘intensive development’. Razvitie is practised in the domestic realm, pursued through formal-education frameworks and promoted through a wide range of enrichment activities. Much energy and hard work is put in by the immigrants into integrating socially and securing the financial well-being of their families, with a particular investment made in the field of childrearing and education. These parents, most of them with some form of higher education, perceive childhood education as one of the crucial arenas in which they must invest in order to lay the groundwork of belonging to the middle class. The chapter shows how cultural models of childrearing and education brought from home undergo subtle transformations as they come into contact with local Israeli ways.